The media had reported that she was building a "grand Taj Mahal" in her village.
New Delhi: "Would you call this a mansion with a hundred ornate windows and floors made of Italian marble?" asked Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati as she escorted a group of visiting journalists around her parents' under-construction bungalow in her ancestral village Badalpur on the outskirts of Delhi.
The BSP chief was reacting to reports in a section of the media that she was building a "grand Taj Mahal" in her village. Ms. Mayawati 's point was that while the bungalow was spacious, it was located in the countryside and was nowhere near as ostentatious as sections of the media had mischievously alleged: "Do you see a Taj Mahal here?" As the invited presspersons went from room to room, she pointed to the "broken floor and the peeling plaster," adding that these were in fact signs the construction material used was inexpensive.
Ms. Mayawati said the house belonged to her parents who had constructed it with funds raised from the sale of other ancestral property. "Had the media checked the revenue records, they would have found out I do not even own this house," she said. Ms. Mayawati saw the "media slander" as part of a larger "conspiracy" aimed at disadvantaging her in the coming Assembly election in Uttar Pradesh, which "the BSP was poised to win."
She said her party was too well placed to be affected by malicious campaigns of this kind.
But such " unrelentingly partisan and deliberately anti-BSP reportage" was likely to tarnish the media as a whole in the eyes of the Dalit community.
Vidya Subrahmaniam
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